I took some time reading (again, I believe I read this thread before) about this game. Nice discussion, with technical issues being raised by talented msx developers.

I saw the ZX POP version. Although I just watched the youtube video, I hardly think it sucks as it was said here. I saw a nice game to play, although POP is not my kind of game. People tend to forget what we learnt from Konami: What matters is not the full color graphics but the playability. Who cares if the player only has one color? I saw a fast action game (at least, close to the original). The only thing I missed here are the sounds, and I don't believe the coder couldn't do it due to any project limitation, I think he simply didn't want to add the sounds. With the sfx and music, it would be a great game to be played in MSX.

So, it would be nice if someone could take the time to port this ZX game to MSX. I don't care if it needs MSX2 and/or z80 at 7 mhz to achieve the same results as the ZX spectrum. Of course, if he could also (maybe I'm asking too much) add the missing sfx/sounds it would be a perfect POP version in MSX (at least to me).

Prince of persia on C64 uses a 512kb rom cartridge to make the game possible, as you can read on lemon64 forums, the game has all the data on the cartridge and dumps the animation of the character in real time from the rom, on MSX2 the game has to be in rom and dump the current frame you need of the character, the game cant be on disk, unless you have 512kb of ram.

The game has to be on SC5 16 colours, you can not use sprites for the characters because they run behind the columns, unless you find the way of how to use sprites and cut them behind the columns.

I think the Z80 code of Spectrum version is valid to por to MSX2, but the graphics has to be patched, I recomend to use the Atari ST graphics because they are 16 colours and fits well with SC5 MSX2.

is not easy to do, this is the reason why nobody has done in MSX2 Prince of Persia, the constant rom/Vram dump is very difficult to code so that everything goes at a good speed.

Just reviving this post. I was wondering how far exactly did the MSX POP version make it?

I'm asking this because I recently read the POP for C64 remake blog which is an amazing project BTW. Also the official source code of the original Apple II version has been released (https://github.com/jmechner/Prince-of-Persia-Apple-II) along with the VGA GFX of the DOS version. Maybe the new information now available could help move this further along?

POP is doable on msx1 (does not need so much gfx) and msx2. Animations and speed are perfectly doable IMHO on msx1 via z80 and on msx2 via blitter commands.

The problem is the huge amount of ram it needs. How about reserving 32KB and load levels from disk when needed? (like and overlay tecnique used on old days on pc to fit a 2-3 MB program in 640KB conventional memory). Or like the c64 Ghost'n'Goblins that load every level from tape.